Today was the first game of the season for my son’s AYSO U-10 soccer league. Actually, it was a sort of pre-season game, in that it won’t count toward the standings in determining the playoff schedule (fortunately, since we lost). But it was the first time “The Blitz” met a real opponent as a team, after a few weeks of practices.
The day began with a severe lighting and thunder storm, complete with hail, which cancelled the first game of the day. The storm cleared by the time we were up, but it remained overcast and cool. The latter was good for the kids running around like mad, while the former was good for me, providing even, if a little dim, lighting in which to take photographs. Sunny days are tough — it’s easier to freeze the action, but you are constantly fighting the harsh shadows.
I started with my 85mm prime lens, which is a nice piece of glass and the longest “good lens” I have, but I just could not get in close enough, so I switched over to my 70-300mm zoom. At the 300mm end, it really lets me get in tight from far across the field, but it is a relatively cheap lens, and the image quality reveals this. Among other things, it has lots of chromatic aberration, which is hard to explicitly see unless you have an abrupt white to black transition, in which case you see purple fringing, but which casts the whole image a little blurry. Combined with the slowish shutter speeds that result from relatively low light at that focal length, and without a tripod, the images are not the crispest in the world. Still, there are a few interesting ones below.
